- Oct 04, 2019 How to Format your External Hard Drive. This is a question that often comes up when you decide to buy an external hard drive or when you want to use one and it is not formatted for your operating system: no chance to walk on your computer. To make an analogy: it’s a bit like a key and a lock: if your key is not made for your lock, it will never open your door!
- Apr 24, 2019 Is there any way to install and run Windows 10 from an external hard drive? As we all know, Linux can be easily installed and run from an external hard drive as portable Linux OS. The portable Linux OS is very useful, because we can take it anywhere and use it on different computers.
- Apr 04, 2018 Yes, you can have everything installed, and boot from an external hard drive. You would have the choice of either USB 3.0 or a Thunderbolt external drive. The TB will be somewhat more expensive, and the additional speed may not necessarily be worth the money to go Thunderbolt. You might have to go inside and disconnect the internal hard drive.
Jun 22, 2018 Hello, Yes, you can run Windows on Mac machine with USB and there are multiple hacks you will find on Internet. But Before that understand some facts about operating systems. Windows is stubborn operating system so it follows some certain rules. Discover the world of external hard drives for Mac. Compare portable, USB and external hard drive models for office and home and shop online. Aug 25, 2015 I have a mac with a solid state boot drive. The boot drive is pretty small so I would like all my applications on my hard drive. Can I setup my cc programs to be stored on my hard drive but run from my solid state boot drive?
We are really sorry that M4VGear doen't support macOS High Sierra or above now. Our developers are working hard to fix this problem and it needs to take some time. We would post the latest news about our pragram on our Facebook once we find solutions to fix the issue. Currently, if you only have a Mac computer with macOS High Sierra or above and couldn't find a Windows computer to use our Windows version, you can still try to install and run Mac OS X 10.12 or 10.11 on an external hard drive to make M4VGear work under old version of Mac OSX.
In the following guide, we would show you how to install and run MacOS X 10.12 from an external hard drive as an example.
What You’ll Need:
- An external storage device with a minimum capacity of at least 16 GB;
- A copy of the macOS Sierra installer.
- Download the latest version of iTunes to the external hard drive;
- Downlad and install M4VGear for Mac for converting iTunes videos.
It's worth noting that you should download the macOS Sierra installer in the App Store under “Previous buys“ or 'previous bought'. Make sure you click “Download” and let it save to your Mac’s hard drive.
Important Tips: If you download and install macOS Sierra through other sources, your Mac might pop out a message that 'Downloading macOS Sierra the way in your Link is Not possible when your have High Sierra installed (because the file System)'. Under “Previous buys“ or 'previous bought' is a working Link where the Download is working ... You can check and install it in parallels successfully.
Step 1: Format External Hard Disk
In order for your external device to function as a startup disk, it must be formatted as Mac OS Extended and employ a GUID partition map. To check what format your drive is using (and change it), you’ll need to launch your Mac’s Disk Utility. Disk Utility can be found in the Applications > Utilities folder or by searching for it using Spotlight.
Once Disk Utility is running, click on your external device in the left-hand pane and check the partition map. In our case, our drive is partitioned using Master Boot Record rather than GUID. So, we definitely need to format it.
WARNING: Before proceeding, understand that formatting will obviously erase everything on your device. If there is anything you want to save, make sure you back it up first!
First, unmount the device.
Once the drive is unmounted, select the full disk in the left sidebar (labeled “UFD 3.0 Silicon” here)—not the sub-disk(s) under it (labeled “Untitled” here)—and click “Erase” in the top row of buttons.
From the resulting dialog, format your device as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and use the scheme “GUID Partition Map”. You can also give your device an appropriate name, if you want. Then click “Erase”.
When the operation is complete, you will see the following message. Click “Done” to continue.
Step 2: Install macOS Sierra
When macOS Sierra is downloaded, it is saved in your Applications folder. Double-click the installer to begin.
Click “Continue” to proceed.
“Agree” to the software license agreement.
On the next screen, click “Show All Disks”.
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Choose your newly formatted external device and click “Install”.
Enter your system password and hit Enter.
macOS Sierra will now begin installing on your external device. Feel free to grab a cup of coffee or take a shower, because it will take a few minutes.
Before macOS can complete installation, your computer will need to restart. Make sure you save any work and then click “Close Other Applications” to continue.
Once your Mac restarts, it will take about 15 more minutes to finish, and will then boot automatically from the new device.
You will then need to go through the usual macOS setup, including enabling Siri, setting up your time zone, and adding your user account.
Once you’re done with all that, you’ll have a brand new installation of macOS Sierra on your external device.
Make sure you don’t remove or eject your external device while you’re using it, since macOS will periodically need to access it.
How to Boot From Your External macOS Installation?
So let’s say you start having trouble with your internal drive, and want to troubleshoot it. Or maybe you want to use your portable macOS installation on another compatible Mac.
To boot from your external Sierra drive, plug it into the Mac in question, press the power button, and hold the “Option key until the recovery disk screen appears. From there, you can select your external drive and click the arrow to boot into it for that session.
You’ll boot into your macOS Sierra installation where you can use it as normal. The next time you restart that Mac, it will boot to main, internal hard drive as normal. (Or you can hold Option and boot to the external drive again, if needed.)
Now, you can install iTunes and M4VGear on your external hard drive and then smoothly convert iTunes videos as before.
Looking for a way to install and run OS X on an external hard drive? This can be useful for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, it allows you to run another copy of OS X without needing any additional Mac computer.
Also, since you can run a full copy of OS X on the external drive, it can be used for troubleshooting purposes on other Macs or it can be as a kind of virtual OS X. I’ve already written about how you can install OS X in VMware Fusion, but that takes up space on your Mac. Using an external drive, you can save space on your Mac, though it might be a bit slower if you are using USB 2.0.
In this article, I’ll walk you through the requirements and steps to install OS X onto an external hard drive.
Format External Hard Disk
The first thing you’re going to need to do is format the external hard drive properly. The file format has to be Mac OS X Journaled and you have to use the GUID partition map. To do this, open Disk Utility and connect the drive to your Mac.
Under External in the left hand menu, click on your external hard drive and then click on the Erase button. Make sure you backup any data before you erase the drive. When you click Erase, a dialog will pop up where you can configure some options.
Give your drive a name, choose OS X Extended (Journaled) for Format and GUID Partition Map for Scheme. It should only take a minute or two for the drive to be erased and reformatted. Now your drive is ready for OS X.
Install OS X
There are two ways you can install OS X on to your external hard disk: by reinstalling OS X from the OS X Utilities repair screen or by downloading OS X from the App Store and running the installer. I’ll show you both methods in case one isn’t working for you.
The easiest way is to download OS X from the App Store. Once you open the App Store, you’ll see a link on the right for the latest version of OS X (El Capitan as of this writing).
Go ahead and click the Download button to start downloading the installer. Note that if you already have that version of OS X installed, you’ll see a popup message appear asking if you still want to continue or not. Just click Continue.
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Once it has been downloaded, just double-click the installer, which will be located in the Applications folder.
Keep clicking past the license agreement, etc., until you get to the screen that asks you which disk to install OS X on. By default, it is set to MacBook.
Click on the Show All Disks button and you’ll see an icon for the different disks and partitions on the Mac. I named my external hard drive OS X and that shows up in the middle.
You can also tell it’s an external hard disk because it uses the icon with the orange hard drive. Click Continue and then follow the instructions to complete the installation. Note that your computer may restart during the install and you don’t have to do anything. OS X will automatically continue installing onto the external hard drive rather than booting up to your internal version of OS X.
At the end of this article, I’ll show you how to boot up to the external hard drive, so skip down if you ended up using the App Store method. Note that by default, the Mac will start booting up directly to the external hard drive until you change it.
The second method to install OS X is to restart the Mac and press and hold the COMMAND + R keys. This will load up OS X Recovery.
The OS X Utilities screen will appear and here you want to click on Reinstall OS X. Again, you’ll go through some basic screens, but when you get to the hard disk screen, click on Show All Disks again.
Using this method, you’ll have to login using your Apple ID and password so that the entire OS X installer can be downloaded off of Apple’s servers. Whichever method you choose, it will take anywhere from 15 to 30+ minutes to install OS X onto your external hard drive.
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While OS X is installing, your computer will restart a couple of times. Note that when it finally boots into OS X, that is the version running off your external drive. To switch back and forth between the internal and external drive, you have to restart your computer and hold down the OPTION key.
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When you do that, you should see at least four icons. In my case, I have five because I have Windows installed using Boot Camp. Anyway, the grey MacBook and Recovery 10.11.2 icons are for my internal OS X and the orange OS X and Recovery 10.11.3 are for the version installed on my external drive.
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Use the arrow keys to select which drive to boot from and then simply press Enter. If you have a newer Mac and a USB drive that supports USB 3.0, everything should run fairly fast. Overall, it’s a fairly straight-forward process and took me less than an hour to get everything working. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. Enjoy!